Universal data model platform: the data-centric evolution for system level codesign

The rapidly increasing complexity of integrated circuit design is evolving to a more data-centric design scenario that supports sharing of design information. This paper presents the concepts of universal data model platform (UDMP) which introduce the data-centric design revolution into the domain of system level design to support better cooperation of individual steps in electronic design automation (EDA) industry. The goal of UDMP is to provide a set of universal data models which enables wide variety of codesign tools to be integrated tightly and revitalizes the connection between universities and the EDA industry. Furthermore, an application programming interface (API) takes the place of traditional low-bandwidth file formats to provide access to the internal data models, thus improves efficiency of design iteration. The well-constructed structure of UDMP brings some challenges for the architects as well as current system level researchers and designers. The concepts of UDMP are applied to a simplified interface synthesis flow which contains three algorithms. Primary experiment results show that these algorithms are simplified with a running time reduction by about 10% for selected designs